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on the Georgian.
    This would have mattered less if some effort had been made to maintain these houses, but Wexford, looking at them with a sinking heart, could not see a single freshly painted façade. Their plaster was cracked and their pillars streaked where water had run through dust. Rubbish clogged the basement areas and these were separated from the pavement by broken railings patched with wire netting. Instead of trees, parking meters stood in a grey row, an avenue of them leading up the cul-de-sac to where it ended in a red-brick church.
    There were few people about, a turbaned Sikh lugging his dustbin up area steps, an old woman wheeling a pram filled apparently with jumble-sale spoils, a pregnant black girl whose kingfisher-blue raincoat provided the only colour in the street. The wind blew paper out of the Sikh’s dustbin, whirling sheets of newsprint up into the grey sky. It teased at the girl’s woolly hair which, in a pathetic attempt to be accepted, to be in fashion, she was trying to grow long. Wexford wondered sadly about these coloured people who must have looked to a promised land and had found instead the bitter indecency of Garmisch Terrace.
    ‘Wold anyone live here from choice?’ he said to Sergeant Clements, who, while Howard studied are port in the car, had attached himself to him as mentor, guide, and possibly protector.
    ‘You may well ask, sir,’ said the sergeant approvingly. His manner was not quite that of the schoolmaster addressing a promising pupil. Wexford’s rank and age were recognized and respected, but he was made aware of the age-old advantage of the townsman over the greenhorn from the country. Clements’ plump face, a face which seemed not to have changed much since he was a fat-cheeked, rosebud-mouthed schoolboy, wore an expression both smug and discontented. ‘They like it, you see,’ he explained. ‘They like muck and living four to a room and chucking their gash about and prowling all night and sleeping all day.’ He scowled at a young man and woman who, arm in arm, crossed the road and sat down on the pavement outside the church where they began to eat crisps out of a bag. ‘They like dropping in on their friends at midnight and dossing down on the floor among the fag-ends because the last bus has gone. Ask ’em and most of ’em don’t know where they live, here this week, there the next, catch as catch can and then move on. They don’t live like you or me sir. They live like those little furry moles you have down in the country, always burrowing about in the dark.’
    Wexford recognized in the sergeant a type of policeman which is all too common. Policemen see so much of the seamy side of life and, lacking the social worker’s particular kind of training, many of them become crudely cynical instead of learning a merciful outlook. His own Mike Burden came dangerously near sometimes to being such a one, but his intelligence saved him. Wexford didn’t think much of the sergeant’s intelligence, although he couldn’t help rather liking him.
    ‘Poverty and misery aren’t encouragements to an orderly life,’ he said, smiling to take the sting out of the admonition.
    Clements didn’t take this as a rebuke but shook his head at so much innocence.
    ‘I was referring to the young , sir, the young layabouts like that pair over there. But you’ll learn. A couple of weeks in Kenbourne Vale and you’ll get your eyes opened. Why, when I first came here I thought hash was mutton stew and STD a dialling system.’
    Perfectly aware of the significance of these terms, Wexford said nothing, but glanced towards the car. He was beginning to feel chilly and at a nod from Howard he moved under the porch of number 22. That a lecture, contrasting the manners of modern youth with the zeal, ambition and impeccable morality of Clements’ contemporaries in his own young days, was imminent he felt sure, and he hoped to avoid. But the sergeant followed him, stamping his feet on the